Religion Dispatches
…t, no one would’ve cared about this anniversary, so they shouldn’t make an international situation out of it. Second, even if they felt they needed to be alert, but not alarmed, empowering the people most likely to lash out is not constructive. Third, if you create an environment where Danish Muslims feel engaged and part of the society, it’s a lot harder for false indignation to gain traction overseas. This is an unfortunate decision by the Danis…
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…Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and its affiliated Advance Training Institute International (ATI). He claims to pray for IBLP founder Bill Gothard “every day,” has traveled with Gothard, has spoken at Gothard’s conferences (2009 and 2010 programs are online), and has contributed to “Wisdom Booklets” training materials that include David Barton and his Christian American history. These include The Light and the Glory, a Christian American history text…
Read More…esis remains the big boy in the business, far ahead of Creation Ministries International (from which AIG split a few years ago) and Institute for Creation Institute. AIG is the owner of the Kentucky-based Creation Museum, which features saddle-wearing dinosaurs and a recreation of Noah’s Ark built to biblical scale. Sadly, the gross revenue of National Center for Science Education, the primary defender of public education from anti-science attacks…
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…ng the supposedly (but not really) secular arm of Gothard’s institute, the International Association of Character Cities. As I noted there, even Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the evangelical world, has expressed dismay over the “alarming” nature of Gothard’s teachings on authority, and allegations of physical and emotional abuse in his programs. (For the most comprehensive treatment of the IACC, see Silja J.A. Talvi’s 2006 piece in…
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…had gained the respect of the Israeli public (both Jewish and Arab) and of international disaster relief organizations. These have either used Zaka’s direct services of have emulated their techniques in their own relief teams. The Israeli police force now teats the Zaka volunteers and staffers as colleagues. And the Israeli government has recognized a year of service to Zaka as a form of Shnat Sherut—national service. This all sounds very positive…
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…was expecting it would be like the perfect synch between my laptop and my iPhone. Maybe it will be, but not yet. I am just at the place where I can say, it is lighter than my laptop. Oh yeah, and I got another plus: at airport security yesterday, I didn’t even have to take it out of the bag! That was the only good thing at the airport. Ever heard Robin Williams joke about the “random” checks at airport security?’ He reads all these, clearly, Musli…
Read More…s greater than the need of a non-Muslim. This is like the tendency in some international circles to consider the blood of non-Muslim combatants more important than Muslim civilians and combatants with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have a very different sense of the shared human community now, and we need to adjust accordingly. This year, I face a dilemma because it seems the most pressing needs are actually in my own family. Some jurists sa…
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…t purely a religious discussion. We become intensely involved in public or international debate over the dress of fewer than 2000 women in France because they choose (or are influenced to choose) to wear the niqab. The niqab covers the face, except the eyes, with a cloth; usually black and usually also accompanied by a full black garment. The burqa is specific to the regions of Afghanistan, but sometimes the term gets called in for any extreme for…
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…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…
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…basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions. Imagine, for example, working intently on some task until you notice that your stomach is rumbling and that the daylight has shifted. You think back to when you last ate, gauge how long you’ve been working, and give yourself five minutes to finish up before having a light snack, so as not to ruin your dinner. An MRI scan of this thought proces…
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